sitting in front of the corncob fire that flamed and blazed in
the great, gaping, sooty fireplace. A rough overcoat was flung over the
chair behind him and his hands were spread out to the roaring warmth.
At the sound of the lifted latch and of Hiram's entrance he turned his
head, and when Hiram saw his face he stood suddenly still as though
turned to stone. The face, marvelously altered and changed as it was,
was the face of his stepbrother, Levi West. He was not dead; he had
come home again. For a time not a sound broke the dead, unbroken silence
excepting the crackling of the blaze in the fireplace and the sharp
ticking of the tall clock in the corner. The one face, dull and stolid,
with the light of the candle shining upward over its lumpy features,
looked fixedly, immovably, stonily at the other, sharp, shrewd,
cunning--the red wavering light of the blaze shining upon the high cheek
bones, cutting sharp on the nose and twinkling in the glassy turn of the
black, ratlike eyes. Then suddenly that face cracked, broadened, spread
to a grin. "I have come back again, Hi," said Levi, and at the sound of
the words the speechless spell was broken.

Hiram answered never a word, but he walked to the fireplace, set the
candle down upon the dusty mantelshelf among the boxes and bottles, and,
drawing forward a chair upon the other side of the hearth, sat down.

His dull little eyes never moved from his stepbrother's face. There was
no curiosity in his expression, no surprise, no wonder. The heavy under
lip dropped a little farther open and there was more than usual of
dull, expressionless stupidity upon the lumpish face; but that was all.

As was said, the face upon which he looked was strangely, marvelously
changed from what it had been when he had last seen it nine years
before, and, though it was still the face of Levi West, it was a very
different Levi West than the shiftless ne'er-do-well who had run away to
sea in the Brazilian brig that long time ago. That Levi West had been
a rough, careless, happy-go-lucky fellow; thoughtless and selfish, but
with nothing essentially evil or sinister in his nature. The Levi West
that now sat in a rush-bottom chair at the other side of the fireplace
had that stamped upon his front that might be both evil and sinister.
His swart complexion was tanned to an Indian copper. On one side of his
face was a curious discoloration in the skin and a long, crooked, cruel
scar that ran diagonally acr